Posts Tagged ‘open’
Truckla, Chargla, and Simonela
Posted on: April 2, 2023
In 2018, Simone Giertz turned her Tesla into a truck and called it Truckla. She beat Tesla to creating a truck that actually worked.
Now Simone is back with a robot that inserts the charger into the truck’s port. She affectionately called it Chargla.
Chargla is a rough prototype and seems to hump the car when it needs to do its job. This makes the process both informative and entertaining.
Some might take away how important it is to work with different and talented people to get a job done. I appreciate how the company she worked with on Chargla relied on two Raspberry Pis and is making the code open source.
Simonela knows that it is not enough to inspire. When learners and innovators actually do the work and perspire, they need access to open resources, not locked up courses or excuses for why things have to be done a certain way.
Rise up and share
Posted on: July 14, 2021
The video above is about how mistrust for the SARS-CoV2 vaccine grows. I highlight a late segment with an educator’s point of view.
A paediatric group created its own communications department to educate its stakeholders and to counter misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines. It did this because lives and reputations were at stake.
Educators need to adopt a similar mindset as well. It is not enough to just keep our heads down and toil away. We need to speak up against bad ideas, policies, or practices. We need to share our ideas and resources openly and freely.
In our case, lives and reputations are also at stake, but seemingly not as urgently and not as obviously. Educators deal primarily with infodemics not epidemics. If we do not fight against bad ideas like learning styles, ill-informed policies like online proctored exams, or practices like e-doing instead of e-learning, then we passively enable them.
The epidemic lockdowns raised our collective profiles and reputations. Instead of returning to a normal of unseen educator work, we need to rise up and share. We do this to maintain or raise our reputations as knowledge workers. We do this to beat back the infodemic.
Process insights
Posted on: April 13, 2021
Some folks might not like how long behind-the-scenes videos can be. So here is a quick process and product Instagram video.
Those who enjoy longer form videos might like the quirky animation and storytelling of TheOdd1sOut. In his latest video, the main man behind the channel, James, takes shots at uncritical thinkers.
Anyone who has made videos will know how tedious the processes behind video-making can be. James opted to share his difficulty with saying “muggle public school”.
The painful and funny sequence might provide a small insights to non-videographers how much time and effort goes into voiceover work. I can relate because I used to make videos for the now defunct Cel-Ed channel.
On broader reflection, I wonder how many educators share their processes and failures more openly and reflectively. I know I do from time to time on this blog. These are not monetised or amusing, but I am certain that our collective efforts help other educators see that they are not alone.
The best bit of this article might have been left for last. People still conflate (and confuse) modality with pedagogy.
To quote the article: “…online learning is often accused of being passive, and face-to-face learning is described as being dynamic. However, large, lecture-based, on-campus courses can also be passive, and small, online seminar courses can be dynamic and engaging”.
Much depends on the pedagogical design and implementation of each modality. The author advised readers to consider flexible learning, flipped learning, and inquiry-based learning (IBL) from a pedagogical point of view instead of a modal one. She dedicated a paragraph on the brief history of each approach.
My critiques: Having researched and practiced them, I found the flipped and inquiry approaches lacking in detail.
- The “flipped learning” description focused on the early iterations of flipping classroom practice (where things happen) instead of actually flipping the learning (who does what).
- The IBL paragraph did not explore its roots in science education and the thinking that drives it, i.e., learning-to-be and learning-about.
That said, I found the brief review on open pedagogy, open educational practices, OER, and the like useful. There is just as much confusion about what these as the previous issues on modality.
I liked that the author avoided defending one term over another and instead stuck to basic principles: Define every term you use so that others understand you. This is not about sounding high and mighty. It is about basic communication.
Open and empowered
Posted on: May 19, 2020
John Krasinski is an actor from the USA. During the COVID-19 lockdown, he was inspired to focus on Some Good News (SGN) instead of the usual fare.
His latest episode focused on how an online community sprung up from his initiative and offered a glimpse into what other SGNs shows looked like (start at this timestamp).
Krasinski’s efforts remind me of the importance of being open in education and empowering learners. Setting this expectation releases resources and ideas from the shackles of outdated policy and unnecessary administration. Giving permission provides learners and educators with the freedom and responsibility to create, share and learn.
If there is something I would like to emerge after the pandemic dust settles, it is mindsets and behaviours that showcase openness and empowerment. I bet that the joy and creativity that these unleash will help us deal with the next obstacle thrown our way.
Fear Factor: e-Learning Edition 2
Posted on: April 10, 2020
When I shared this idea at a conference in 2013, it was a call to be avoid being totally or blindly reliant on vendor-provided learning management systems (LMS). Right now the principle applies to emergency remote teaching: Do not be reliant on just one platform for video conferencing, e.g., Zoom. Why not? This is my Diigo archive for Zoom-related woes and alternatives.
Today, I would position this thought a bit differently. The closed system would not just be the LMS (which learners lose access to sooner than later), it would be about the closed professional development system.
Progressive schools see the value of mentoring new teachers and continuously developing the professional capacity of all teachers. They do so with events like internal sharing sessions and vendor-conducted workshops. If timely and relevant, these benefit the teachers in that school’s ecosystem.
However, some schools operate as closed systems, i.e., they do not share what they learn openly and regularly so that others outside their school may also learn. If other schools behave the same way, that school does not benefit from the mistakes, lessons, and ideas of the other schools.
It can be difficult to open up tightly closed systems. It might not be worth the trouble to do so given the many other things that teachers already need to do. Fortunately, there is an approximately decade-old solution — social media.
Teachers all over the world have shared their dos and their don’ts in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. They do this even though school conditions and contexts differ. Why? Teachers and teaching remain constant at their core — how to improve teaching so that students learn better.
If you need evidence, you need only trawl the last month’s edu-Twitter streams. Teachers all over the world freely and openly have shared their ideas on how to design and conduct emergency remote teaching, offered tips on synchronous and asynchronous lessons, outlined stay-at-home plans, and more.
There is still a fear that being so open is risky. But sharing your ideas with other teachers is not a zero-sum game. Giving ten ideas does not mean you lose those ten. In all likelihood you will receive the gratitude of other teachers, suggestions on how to improve your own ideas, and raise your reputational capital.
I say this to administrators, policymakers, or teachers who have Fear 2: You risk nurturing teachers who are risk-averse if you do not encourage them to share openly and responsibly. These teachers then cannot model similar behaviours for their students.
Sharing openly
Posted on: February 12, 2018
One of the initiatives I led when I was a faculty member was using open learning tools and resources.
While administrators of academic institutions lock information down with the help of publishers, I countered with open publishing. While instructors concerned themselves with strict copyright and intellectual property rights, I pushed open source and Creative Commons resources.
I still model this mindset and behaviour by using ImageCodr to embed and attribute CC-licensed images almost every day in this blog. I create and share resources for my talks, workshops, and classes with open and non-expiring tools.
I am not always aware of the reach of these resources because they do not have trackers. However, sometimes I find out via my blog that they are making an impact.
Recently two of my blog reflections received an unusual number of hits. One was Remaking the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy while the other was Dumbfounded (Part 2). Using the WordPress dashboard, I could link the hits to visitors from Cambodia and Egypt respectively.
I was curious as to why, but did not have any answers because the dashboard results were not fine-grained enough.
Thankfully, an educator from Cambodia contacted me to ask for editing rights to my revision of Bloom’s Verb Wheel. She wanted to convert the words to Khmer. As I use that resource actively, I said I could provide a copy as long as the subsequent resources were shared under similar CC licenses.
But I have no idea why so many Egyptians were interested in my critique of a poorly conceived, badly written, and irresponsibly broadcasted programme on Channel News Asia.
The bottomline is this: Those of us in education should share as openly as we can. The people I reached would not have been helped if the resources were not available to them via a quick Google search. We have a responsibility that extends beyond our classrooms and borders.
I read this article yesterday, The Fallacy of Open-Access Publication.
Before anyone processes the problems with some current implementations of “open” access publications, they need to be aware of an even more fundamental problem. The article described it succinctly and accurately:
Publishers are getting rich on the backs of underfunded academic libraries and the unpaid labor of academics who serve as editors, reviewers, and authors. That system is unsustainable.
Anyone who thinks that being a professor is living high up on the food chain does not understand the academic ecosystem. Professors have to buy in to a culture and live with rules long established before they were.
How bad has the situation become with publishers driven only by profit?
Open access has turned out to be a misnomer… open access is clearly not freely open to the scholars who are required to pay exorbitant fees to publish their results, often out of their own pockets. Graduate students who wish to publish two open-access articles a year in the journals of their choice might need to use more than a quarter of their annual income to do so, if they don’t have large grants to cover the fees.
How might scholars stop this rot? The author of the article suggested that scholars supported academic or scientific societies that were non or low-profit. These groups pursue the betterment of their fields, not the profiteering by publishing companies. Let’s not make the open access cookie crumble.
We need to question the belief that once you put something online, it is there forever and for all to see. This is not true all the time.
You can blog or tweet or upload a video on YouTube. But no one might view it, much less respond to it.
You might maintain public wishlists, video playlists, or audio shares that no one sees, watches, or listens to.
Dropbox recently changed its public folder policy. HTML pages will no longer be sharable so you cannot run a low-traffic website out of Dropbox.
As of October 3, 2016, you can no longer use shared links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox, it will no longer render in the browser.
Just because something is online does not immediately make it visible, sharable, or valuable.
But post a naughty photo or say something stupid, and potential employers and the authorities might shut doors on you.
So it is not enough to say “be careful online” or “do not put things online”. These generic rules, even if illustrated with cases, are not meaningful. Only what connects with each owner and creator of the content as well as their intended and unintended audiences are meaningful.
Last week I volunteered for a school’s career guidance event for students. The students chose who they wanted to interview in half-hour intervals and we shared our hearts out.
A teacher inserted himself into my group’s discussion. As we meandered from one topic to another, that teacher declared this about his students: “They prefer pen and paper.”
No, they do not. Students have been conditioned to accepting them. The Principal of Change articulated this in a recent blog entry:
many of our students are so used to “school” that something outside the lines of what they know terrifies them just as much as any adult. If school has become a “checklist” for our students (through doing rubrics, graduation requirements, etc.), learning that focuses on creation and powerful connections to learning, not only take more effort, but more time, which sometimes frustrates many students.
There is an immediacy to paper which needs to be examined in more ways than one. If you have a notebook or scrap ready, there is quickness of use and illustration that is hard to beat. Some might also value the feel of paper as a form of immediate recognition.
But paper is also immediate in that what happens there immediately stops there. There is no hyperlinking or ease of editing, copying, and sharing. The affordances of paper, as wonderful as they are, also have limited pedagogy: Go where I say, stay where you are, write neatly, do not copy, do not share, etc.
Paper is comforting because it does not push pedagogy to new ground, so schools use a lot of it. Other than the newspaper industry, I do not know any other organization that relies on so much paper. OK, maybe the toilet paper industry.
Ultimately, schools justify the pen and paper mode of instruction because of the pen and paper exams. This is despite the increasingly non-pen and paper life and work that awaits learners when they move on.
Saying kids prefer pen and paper is like saying they would rather use encyclopedias instead of Google or Wikipedia. (BTW, they know the limitations of those tools better than teachers might expect).
Just ask enough of our kids the same questions the teens were asked in the video above. Their responses might not be as colourful as the ones in the video, but you are likely to get similar responses.
Like the video, you will get a few responses about paper-form books based on nostalgia and tactility. But these come from a place of honesty and passion, not from conditioning by a schooling system that refuses to change. These come from students who learn how to think by themselves instead of providing conditioned responses.
Do we assume nostalgia to be important enough not to change? Do teachers have a right to recreate their own world instead of preparing kids for theirs? I borrow another quote from The Principal of Change in the same blog entry:
if we do not challenge our students in the learning they do in school, what are we preparing them for? What mindset will we actually create in our students? It is important, if not crucial, to really listen and act upon student voice…
How much longer are we going to maintain conditions for “pen and paper” conditioned responses?
Another dot in the blogosphere? 